Death Of Democracy?

The televised ‘debate’ featuring the leaders of seven political parties in the run up to the 2015 general election presented a stark choice. I cannot remember what view UKIP’s Nigel Farage gave on spending cuts, but Nicola Sturgeon for the Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood and Natalie Bennett for the Green Party all spoke out against the austerity imposed by David Cameron’s Conservative party. Labour and the Liberal Democrats promised to balance the books without cutting as deeply as the Tories.

A few weeks later, as we now know, the SNP triumphed in Scotland at the General Election. Ironically, this support for the anti-austerity SNP has contributed to the Conservatives gaining a justification (I hesitate to call it a ‘mandate’, because in fact they received less than 37% of the vote) for implementing their extreme cuts. Essentially, the left-wing vote is now split and UKIP hasn’t managed to take enough votes from the Conservatives to break the right-wing in the same way, so we may never have a single left-wing party (Labour) able to win a majority again.

That said, as I posted at the time if you want a strong commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions across the board, including the transport sector, neither Labour nor the Conservatives are an attractive proposition. In fact, until Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour party and took his party to the left, I considered Labour and the Tories to be much-of-a-muchness. If Corbyn’s opponents get their way and the Labour party moves back to ‘the centre ground of British politics’ we’ll be back to a choice between red mud or blue mud.

Disproportionate result (from TheEconomist via Sophy Ridge on Twitter)So, either we have a choice between two very similar, terrible, options or we don’t really have a choice at all because the left-wing vote is split and only the Tories can win. Either way, our democracy is broken largely because our electoral system (First Past The Post) is broken.

Who set the agenda for the TV coverage of the election? Apart from the Trident nuclear deterrent, defence hardly got a mention, and there was nothing of substance on the environment and climate change. It was frequency claimed that the economy and something else (I think it was the NHS) were the ‘key election issues’, but who decided which issues were important? How many voters felt they were being told to base their decision on who to vote for on just those issues, rather than what really mattered to them? Electoral reform was only mentioned after the Tories, probably the party of first past the post more than any other, had won. Dan Snow said on Panorama Live that the First Past The Post voting system was tearing the nation apart, fuelling Scotland’s desire to become independent, when really we want to stay united.